ABSTRACT
The most enduring critical legacy of William Blake's rediscovery in the second half of the nineteenth century is the identification of Blake as Symbolist. 'Symbolism' is not a word that Blake uses nor is it deployed with any regularity in the handful of reviews and notes on Blake that were written during his lifetime and yet throughout the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, critics have found it hard to read Blake without recourse to a theorization of the Blakean text as symbol. Focusing on William Blake: A Critical Essay by A. C. Swinburne, the herald of British Decadence, this chapter both attempts to recover Blake's Decadence and to consider how a decadent Blake might productively complicate the poet's Symbolic legacy for a modern readership. The erasure of Blake's Decadence at the hands of Symons and Yeats is characteristic of the short life enjoyed by the Decadent Movement before it was succeeded by Symbolism.
